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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Henry David Thoreau

1816-1861 ,
Concord ,
MA, United States

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. He was introduced to the countryside at a young age, and this first contact with the natural world sparked a lifelong fascination. Although his family lived in relative poverty, subsisting on the income from their small pencil-making business, Thoreau was able to attend Harvard, where he gained an early reputation as an individualist. After graduating in 1837, he assisted his father with the family business and worked for several years as a schoolteacher.

In 1841, Thoreau was invited to live in the home of his neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. There he began meeting with the group now known as the Transcendentalist Club, which included A. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley. Thoreau passed his time at the Emerson house writing essays and poems for the transcendentalist journal The Dial and doing odd jobs like gardening and mending fences. In 1845, he began building a small house on Emerson's land on the shore of Walden Pond, where he spent more than two years "living deep and sucking out all the marrow of life." His experiences there formed the basis for two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and his masterpiece, Walden, which advocated a lifestyle of self-sufficiency and simplicity.

Although Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining. It is as a prose writer that Thoreau made his most meaningful contributions, both as a stylist and as a philosopher. A tireless champion of the human spirit against the materialism and conformity that he saw as dominant in American culture, Thoreau's ideas about civil disobedience, as set forth in his 1849 essay, have influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and his mastery of prose style has been acknowledged by writers as disparate as Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Miller. Largely ignored in his own time, the self-styled "inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms" has emerged as one of America's greatest literary figures. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, in his native Concord.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Poems of Nature (1895)Collected Poems (1943)

Prose

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854)Excursions (1864)Cape Cod (1865)Letters to Various Persons (1865)A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866)The Correspondance of Henry David Thoreau (1958)Thoreau's Literary Notebook (1840-1840) (1964)

by this poet

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou

Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and

Within the circuit of this plodding life,There enter moments of an azure hue,Untarnished fair as is the violetOr anemone, when the spring strews themBy some meandering rivulet, which makeThe best philosophy untrue that aimsBut to console man for his grievances.I have